Typically, timing recovery in serializer/deserializer (SerDes) links for data transmission is done using a phase detector. An example of the phase detector is a bang-bang phase detector commonly used in optical transmission. A bang-bang phase detector does not contain any information about the absolute value of the phase error but only about its sign. The bang-bang phase detector uses 2 slicers including a first slicer referred to as a data slicer that samples in the center of an eye and a second slicer referred to as a crossing slicer that samples at the zero crossings. The use of two (or more) slicers in the SerDes links may provide increased performance but at the sacrifice in terms of power, complexity, a design time, and a required surface area due to the additional analog circuits required to implement the two (or more) slicers to support the complexity of the associated phase-locked loop (PLL) algorithm.